Adyen’s first quarter announcement provided ample evidence of embedded finance’s momentum as platforms and marketplaces seek to build payments into their own business models. Platforms net revenue reached €55.5 million, up 63% year over year, per the company’s financials, with significant demand in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment. Processed volumes were up 61% excluding the impact of eBay, to €314.8 billion. The number of platform business customers, stood at 177,000, up from 96,000 in the same time frame last year. Adyen also said that it has 30 platform customers that process more than €1 billion annually, up from 19 a year ago. Issuing volumes have increased, though management added that this part of the business is relatively small and will take time to grow. Within the digital pillar, net revenues surged 13% to €320.4 million, on the heels of demand in the content and subscriptions verticals. Unified Commerce — comprised of Adyen’s operations that connect online and offline payments for client firms’ cross-channel efforts — saw revenue growth of 31% to €158.8 million, with growth in the retail and the food and beverage segments. Processed volumes gained 37%, while 592 customers leveraged the Unified Commerce operations to process payments across multiple regions, up 77 customers year over year.
Amazon launches Nova Premier, its most capable AI model yet- has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go
Amazon released what the company claims is the most capable AI model in its Nova family, Nova Premier, which can process text, images, and videos (but not audio). It is available in Amazon Bedrock, the company’s AI model development platform. Amazon says that Premier excels at “complex tasks” that “require deep understanding of context, multi-step planning, and precise execution across multiple tools and data sources.” Nova Premier, which has a context length of 1 million tokens, meaning it can analyze around 750,000 words in one go, is weaker on certain benchmarks than flagship models from rival AI companies such as Google. In bright spots for Premier, the model does well on tests for knowledge retrieval and visual understanding, SimpleQA and MMMU, according to Amazon’s internal benchmarking. In Bedrock, Premier is priced at $2.50 per 1 million tokens fed into the model and $12.50 per 1 million tokens generated by the model. Importantly, Premier isn’t a “reasoning” model. As opposed to models like OpenAI’s o4-mini and DeepSeek’s R1, it can’t take additional time and computing to carefully consider and fact-check its answers to questions.